Final Option

peruse. In addition, the boxes of personal records that I’d had sent to me from Pamela’s house had arrived late Friday afternoon.
    I began in the conference room where the trading tickets were laid out in neat piles, bound together in individual stacks, each one representing a single day’s trading. Sherman had made up a key listing the name of the trading account and the corresponding account number. With the clearinghouse’s computer list of trades in one hand, I picked up the first stack of tickets and began to flip through them. My heart sank.
    Whatever was I going to discover in this flurry of paper? The chain of communication in futures is stripped down for speed. At Hexter Commodities, like other retail futures firms, brokers placed orders on behalf of a client by writing them down on an order ticket, which was then passed to a phone clerk who called it down to the floor of the exchange. From there, another phone clerk wrote out another order form and handed it to a runner, whose job it was to carry it as quickly as possible to the floor broker, who then executed the trade.
    Savage’s assertion that the Deodar account actually belonged to Hexter didn’t sit right with me. I believed that Bart might have wanted the funds free from his wife’s scrutiny. But why would he risk embarrassing exposure by flaunting CFTC regulations, especially with someone like Herman Geiss dogging his every transaction? Besides, if it was indeed Hexter behind both accounts, who had taken the account records and dumped the computer files? And more importantly, why?
    Yet, as the hours of the morning slipped by, the order tickets seemed to bear out Savage’s story. The CFTC required that no order be placed without an account number. This regulation was designed to prevent trade allocation—an illegal practice—whereby profitable trades are systematically assigned to one account and losers passed off on another. But as I examined the tickets, it became apparent that the account numbers for trades made for Hexter’s own account and Deodar had been written in after the fact. Sometimes the order was written in ink and the account number in pencil. Frequently it looked as though the account number had been added by a different hand entirely.
    And yet, when I forced myself to meticulously chart the trades from the tickets, no particular pattern of allocation appeared—profitable and unprofitable trades appeared randomly distributed throughout both accounts. The only explanation that made sense was the one that Savage had offered.
    Clearly Hexter was guilty of exceeding position limits. Entering trades without account numbers was also a technical violation of the law, though I couldn’t see how the CFTC would get very far with that one since it did not appear that anyone profited or lost by the practice. It was also apparent that trade allocation between Hexter and Deodar could not have been accomplished by Hexter alone—Savage, the phone clerk, and floor trader must all have been aware of it. Could one of them have been responsible for destroying the account information? Certainly they’d have had the opportunity, but where was the motive?
    When I looked at my watch it was four o’clock. If anything, I was more confused than when I’d started.
     
    I spent the rest of the day in my underwear with Jeannette. Jeannette is my good mother. She is a fashionable, no-nonsense woman in her fifties who launched her personal shopping service when her youngest daughter went off to college. A particularly well-turned-out employee benefits attorney I once met at a Bar Association luncheon gave me her name. In time, I’ve learned that Jeannette is any number of professional women’s little secret.
    I arrived at Jeannette’s—a well-lit loft on Oak Street that was just far enough west of Michigan for the rent to be reasonable—and, as always, I was seized by the inevitable sensation of having unexpectedly arrived in a foreign country. There was a low coffee table with a plate of fruit on it, and I knew there was other furniture in there somewhere, but all of it was buried under an avalanche of clothes. There were mountains of jackets, piles of blouses, box after box of pantyhose. There were bras and panties, nightgowns and bathrobes, and a blizzard of little jewelry boxes. Two long racks, completely filled, were set up on either side of the three-way mirror, to which had been taped my list of what I told Jeannette I needed for the